Capabilities of enhanced simulated-annealing-based algorithms in solving process planning problems in reconfigurable manufacturing are investigated. The algorithms are enhanced by combining variants of the simulated annealing technique with other algorithm concepts such as (i) knowledge exploitation and (ii) parallelism. Four configurations of simulated annealing algorithms are devised and enga...

UNLABELLED To fabricate high-performance metal-halide perovskite solar cells, a thermal annealing process is indispensable in preparing high quality perovskite film. And usually such annealing is performed on hot plate. However hot-plate annealing could cause problems such as inhomogeneous heating (induced by non-tight contact between the sample and the plate), it is also not fit for large scal...

Effects of post-sintering annealing treatment between 300 and 1000ºC for up to 8 hrs time periods followed by either furnace cooling (FC) or air-cooling (AC) on the hard magnetic properties of some Nd-Fe-B based sintered magnets was investigated. It was shown that the intrinsic coercivity (Hci), second quadrant demagnetization loop shape and thus the energy density (BH)max varied considerably a...

We found that the extinction coefficient of ion-beam-sputtered titanium dioxide films first decreased with increasing annealing temperature then increased drastically when annealing temperature was increased above ~200 degrees C for 24 h of annealing time. The decreasing extinction coefficient with annealing temperature was attributed to a reduction in absorption owing to oxidation of the film ...

A theoretical analysis is presented with experimental confirmation to conclusively demonstrate the critical role that annealing plays in efficient PCR amplification of GC-rich templates. The analysis is focused on the annealing of primers at alternative binding sites (competitive annealing) and the main result is a quantitative expression of the efficiency (eta) of annealing as a function of te...

We applied simulated annealing algorithm to nurse scheduling problem. For time complexity problem of simulated annealing, we suggested an efficient transition rule using cost matrix for simulated annealing. The experimental results showed that the suggested method generated a nurse scheduling faster in time and better in quality compared to traditional simulated annealing.

For many optimization algorithms the time to solution depends not only on the problem size but also on the specific problem instance and may vary by many orders of magnitude. It is then necessary to investigate the full distribution and especially its tail. Here, we analyze the distributions of annealing times for simulated annealing and simulated quantum annealing (by path integral quantum Mon...

Population annealing is a Monte Carlo algorithm that marries features from simulated-annealing and parallel-tempering Monte Carlo. As such, it is ideal to overcome large energy barriers in the free-energy landscape while minimizing a Hamiltonian. Thus, population-annealing Monte Carlo can be used as a heuristic to solve combinatorial optimization problems. We illustrate the capabilities of popu...